Small browser firms are once again asking for Microsoft to show them some love. (Source: WebMD)

"We can't compete with the sort of money that the top guys have, so this choice screen is enormously important. And it's just enormously disappointing that it happened this way." -- Flock spokesman

Small browsers can only be found by scrolling sideways

Microsoft
has found itself having to alter its practices on several occasions
in Europe and the U.S. after regulators stepped in and forced change.
One of the most recent instances was when the European Commission
asked Microsoft to make browser selection more open and fair to other
browser makers in Europe.

Microsoft and the EC worked for
months to come to an agreement on how exactly Microsoft would go
about offering users of Windows a choice of other browsers rather
than simply bundling IE with its OS. The result was the browser
ballot box, or Browser Choice screen.

Microsoft's first ballot
box offer didn’t make it and eventually the Redmond,
Washington-based company offered to randomize the placement of
browsers within the choice screen. In December 2009, the EU was
reportedly set
to agree to the randomized ballot box. Eventually the
randomized choice screen was approved and Microsoft announced in
February that it would start rolling
the ballot screen out to users in Europe on March 1.

The
final form of the ballot box randomized the order of the major
browsers on the screen and left the five major offerings on the main
page, with other significantly smaller browsers available as options
if the user scrolled the screen to the side.

EWeek reports
that the rational behind making the ballot screen only show the five
major browser options was fear that offering 12 browsers on one
screen would be overwhelming and users would simply close the box and
stick with IE. Smaller browser firms whose products are not on
the main page are set to ask Microsoft to alter
the ballot box again to give their offerings more prominent
placement.

The six smaller browser firms making the request
include Maxthon, SlimBrowser, Avant Force, Flock, Sleipnir and
GreenBrowser. Representatives from these firms registered a formal
petition with the EC on March 3 that protested that their browsers
were only viewable if the user scrolled sideways.

The petition
stated, "It is clear that the final Choice Screen design leaves
the vast majority of users unaware that there are more than five
browsers to choose from. This is inconsistent with the EU
Commission's stated goal for the Choice Screen—to provide European
consumers with 'information on the 12 most widely used Web browsers
and to allow users to easily download and install one or more of
these Web browsers.'"

A spokesperson for Shawn Hardin,
CEO of Flock, stated, "The EC recommended that the seven browser
companies engage with Microsoft as a group, and if they can come to a
mutually agreed-upon solution, the EC will fully support it. Flock
CEO Shawn Hardin has reached out to Microsoft on behalf of the group
to schedule a meeting, and Microsoft responded that they 'will get
back to the group shortly.'"

The small browser firms
claim that how the browser screen is configured is a matter of
survival for them. Not being able to get prominent first page
placement for their browsers hurts the ability for the small firms to
compete according to the companies.

Hardin said, "We
can't compete with the sort of money that the top guys have, so this
choice screen is enormously important. And it's just enormously
disappointing that it happened this way."

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Its bundled with windows because Microsoft realized how important the internet is for the consumer. To gimp a computer by not bundling the software makes the consumer suffer. What Microsoft did was make the whole process easy for the average computer user. Instead of getting 30+ install disks for all the various programs people would need back in the day. Microsoft bundled everything.

If you need something thats not with windows Go out and find it. There is so much advertisement on the internet for alternatives.

Microsoft is selling a product. And it so happens Notepad, calc, sound, basic outlook, Internet explorer, windows media player, are all bundled because consumers asked for it. They wanted everything in one package, especially IT departments for Corporations.

Countries like Brazil, are already switching over to linux because its free to own and its a bit more stable when configured properly.

quote: Its bundled with windows because Microsoft realized how important the internet is for the consumer. To gimp a computer by not bundling the software makes the consumer suffer.

It's not that simple, though. Microsoft went further than just including the (admittedly very useful and welcome) Internet Explorer with windows. They made it a required windows component, and one that couldn't even be removed (ostensibly). The libraries that IE used were loaded at boot time, improving the start-up time of IE, but worsening the boot up time of Windows.

Why did Microsoft do all this? Was it just to keep the consumer from suffering? More likely, it was to allow them to catch up in the browser race, that they were then losing to Netscape.

Was it within Microsoft's rights to do this? Of course. At least, until anti-trust laws were applied. But let's not pretend it was some philanthropic gesture on their part. They wanted to have browser dominance, and they achieved it, even if it did make Windows 98 incredibly unstable.

Personally, I was glad to have a browser pre-installed, having installed netscape manually from 4 floppies (you could also download it via ftp). Using IE to install netscape was so much simpler. So I thank them for that. Somehow, though, I doubt their thought was "people will want a way to download netscape, so let's give them IE." I also didn't like that fact that I couldn't easily unload the IE libraries when I wasn't using them. Eventually, I did switch to IE, because it was better than Netscape. But later, I switched back to Mozilla products.

"But let's not pretend it was some philanthropic gesture on their part."

You misunderstand the nature of a free market. Companies can best seek profit by pleasing their customers. No corporation ever does anything for purely philanthropic motives...nor should they. Even when a firm donates to a charity, it's written off on the balance sheet as a "goodwill" asset...done not for its own sake, but to improve the company image.

The best thing about capitalism is that whenever companies or even private individuals help themselves, they also help the rest of us. So we don't need to rely upon pureness of heart for products to improve and prices to decline...it happens naturally and automatically.

That's a stretch. They make a tradeoff between pleasing themselves and their customers. If they can increase the pleasure of their customers, without costing themselves, they will. Plenty of corporations have done things to anger their customers, without really losing marketshare. This can happen for a variety of reasons.

Microsoft, at the time they began bundling IE with Windows, most users were not really in a position to contemplate changing their OS. Therefore, even if their action angered customers (and I'm not saying it did, in general: most were probably fine with the bundling of IE), they didn't stand to lose anything.

Corporations seek profit by many strategies at their disposal. Sometimes it is by attracting customers. Other times it is by retaining customers. Sometimes, it has nothing to do with the customer, but rather the destruction of a competing business.

I a not a fan of the browser ballot screen. I believe Microsoft certainly has the right to include any kind of software with their OS. I just don't agree that they included IE simply for the sake of customers. They wanted to gain dominance in the browser market, and that was the primary factor. There are plenty of quotes from Microsoft execs that confirm this.

Just because the CONSUMER doesn't pay for it, it doesn't mean there isn't a market. There are other ways to make money other than directly through the consumer.

Just as one of many possible examples of income, browser companies get paid by search engine companies to use their search engine as the default. Google pays Apple $100 million/year to be used as Safari's default search engine.

The more market saturation a browser has, the more desirable it is for other companies to attach themselves to that browser and the more money that browser company is going to be able to command in those deals.

No. Several things are wrong with your analysis. First of all, a market is defined as an area where a produce or service is being bought and sold. In your example of Google paying Apple...are they buying a browser? No. They're buying search engine redirects...a totally different product.

Having a large browser share may help Safari, Firefox, and others make money. But their market is not the browser...its redirects.

But there's a far more serious problem. Antitrust laws exist to protect consumers , not companies. If a company is penalized for damaging a competitor, the underlying principle is that, should that competitor disappear, the monopoly holder could then exploit their position to the detriment of the consumer. But in this case, how is that possible? Browsers are already free and ubiquitous. With the source code for many in the public domain, how could this mythical "browser market war" ever hurt the consumer?

Finally, the most damaging point of all. Browser market or no, the level of competition among browsers has never been better. This EU action isn't going to protect competition...it's going to hurt it. Competition implies the best win, and the worst lose....but this forced ballot box means guaranteed market share to a browser, no matter how good or bad it is.

quote: but this forced ballot box means guaranteed market share to a browser, no matter how good or bad it is.

Err.. no, it only guarantee them to get a place on a small box. Consumers are freely to choose whether they want to keep their current browsers or try some other browsers. Note that I say "try", because they are freely to choose whatever browser they want to use.

IMO this browser ballot issues are practically nonexistant. And most of the time, it will do good for consumers, so what are the problems?

quote: Microsoft doesn't care WHAT you do with their browser idiot. They sell OPERATING SYSTEMS, not browsers !

Oh, really? First of all, MS sells a lot more than Operating Systems, "idiot." They sell Office Suites, have their fingers in advertising revenue, video game hardware, and services. The search engine in browsers, to list just one example, is driven largely by which browser one uses. This can lead to a lot of advertising dollars.

Why was Microsoft freaking out when Google was buying Admob? They shouldn't have cared at all, according to you. After all, all they sell is Operating Systems. Who cares who gets the ad revenue?

Microsoft cares deeply about who uses their browser. If nothing else, if the majority of people use their browser, they can design things their own way and ignore inconvenient groups like W3C. This makes their own development easier. The IE5-IE6 days were great for Microsoft, as they basically could do anything they wanted with ActiveX, their own technology. Now, that ability is slowly being taken away. This is a pain.

If you think MS doesn't care who uses their browser, you are the "idiot." They scrambled to catch up to Netscape once they realized that the information portal for the "net" was being controlled by someone other than them.

If you read the original post you were replying to, I never said anything about Microsoft caring about what you DO with the browser. So your comment didn't make much sense unless I assumed you meant that Microsoft didn't care if you use their browser.

As long as we are arguing stupid semantics, though, "using" the browser is "doing something" with the browser. So if Microsoft care that you use their browser, they do care what you do with it.

If you are saying, Microsoft doesn't care HOW you use their browser, I still don't agree. As I pointed out earlier, they want you to use their browser to use their services. This is why their browser directs to msn.com (homepage) and bing.com (search engine).

So you are still wrong. I'm not sure why you are so upset that I point out Microsoft made some decisions to improve their position in the market. I'd expect nothing less. And as I've stated elsewhere, I do not support this EU browser ballot BS.

Brazil shouldn't be taken as a serious example for nothing. We design digital TV systems that are incompatible with the american, the european and the japanese standards. Just because we want to boost the local industry. There are no actual industries currently able to design and produce the needed electronics for this, but that's another problem anyway, that's not an issue to be dealt by the government who decided which DTV system to adopt.

If americans didn't invent the RJ11, we'd have no computer modems for decades, since our standard-approved PSTN plug measures at least 5cm x 5cm, go figure that on the back panel of a computer.

Every house in the country has NEMA 5–15 power outlets available, since all the good equipment comes from abroad; however, all of a sudden someone decides that there's need for an all new -- compatible with absolutely nothing -- national standard for power outlets, that is losely based (but not equal) to the Swiss Type J SEV 1011 outlet.

If Brazil are switching over to Linux, you'll sure want to take the other way around, trust me...